Personal Data Collection During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Key Takeaways for Global Health and Society

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The guest author for this post is Colette Mazzucelli. She is an Editor for the Anthem Press book series Ethics of Personal Data Collection Series alongside James Felton Keith, which publishes scholarly works at the intersection of data, ethics and digital technology in the 21st century.

In a March 29, 2020 interview on Fareed Zakaria GPS, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore remarked that the “Government has not been using phone data to do contact tracing, but rather “traditional detective work”” during the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in the country. [1] Rather than using a mobile phone app made possible by innovative technology advances [2] to flatten the curve during the pandemic, the Prime Minister explained: “We have been interviewing people, asking them, interviewing them, tracking down their contacts, interviewing their contacts, trying to piece a story together… We hope to get a quick answer out within a couple of hours, but in fact we have pursued the cases for days to try and pin down, who talked to whom and who might have given the virus to whom.” [3] Singapore, like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, relied on historical experience with the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 to “upgrade institutional readiness” handling the pandemic with “a combination of testing, transparency (active citizen information) and citizen awareness guided by a timely and proactive government response.” [4]

There is a wealth of personal data to help with situational awareness, which can be used to refine modelers’ predictions about the spread of the pandemic in different countries. It is particularly important that data collected from citizens by states be acquired in an open manner to inspire trust in government anchoring an “all in it together” experience as more states around the globe combat rising cases of infections and fatalities. [5] The centrality of states in the response to rapid spread of COVID-19 speaks to classical realist insights dating back to “the plague that struck Athens in 430 B.C.” [6] The stricter limitations placed on international travel by state leaders in 2020 point to further deglobalization in the post-Cold War era. Their explanation that states are at “war” with the Novel Coronavirus, including the construction of a narrative with the pandemic cited as an “invisible enemy,” [7] confirms the emergence of infectious diseases as a new security threat. This reality places global health squarely on the 21st century agenda of international relations. [8] Following the next paragraph, twelve key takeaways speak to this new context.

The impact of COVID-19 is already influencing the ways in which we experience and map the interactions of people as agents of transformation inside and across borders. The pandemic increasingly raises questions as to an evolution of thinking within diverse philosophical traditions ranging from classical realism to liberalism to social constructivism, instead of simply an entrenched competition among distinct theories. This change is likely to become the norm in learning, particularly as a transition occurs away from the Western core towards a “deep pluralism” in which postcolonial, feminist, and critical theories figure more prominently. Comparative historical research is relevant, [9] particularly empirical findings that underline a lack of change in social and cultural norms from a gender perspective, i.e., in the United States after the 1918 H1N1 Flu Virus, a pandemic which reinforced the status quo. [10] Although that pandemic led to more fatalities than World War I, there is no memorial to commemorate the human tragedy. The necessity to reason from the planetary perspective underscores the concept of “shared fates” in our world. [11]

1. Emerging pandemics and climate change are twin pillars to frame our analysis of “environmental stewardship” [12] in the context of globalization.

2. The Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a “gray rhino” [13] that marks a new reference point in which the collection of personal data to safeguard the welfare of billions of people on planet Earth is central to environmental stewardship in the study of international relations. [14]

3. Globalization is defined empirically by the unprecedented “mass public transportation across continents” [15] involving over a billion people in the early 21st century leading into the unprecedented Novel Coronavirus pandemic.

4. The personal data of populations, which is acquired and tracked primarily by states, as well as international agencies, notably the World Health Organization (WHO), is subject to monitoring by new technology applications, which potentially could marginalize further the most vulnerable groups in society.

5. Listening to the ethical concerns voiced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), i.e., The Data Union, [16] pertaining to the collection and usage of personal data by states is an essential and emerging feature of globalization.

6. The COVID-19 pandemic situates peoples and their personal data as the agents of systemic economic transformation while leaders simultaneously respond by closing borders to defend international society.[17]

7. The mutual vulnerability of billions defines security in the war to combat an invisible enemy, which replaces the stability of the Cold War era as the norm regulating the relations among people as well as states [18] in a new age of social distancing.

8. The value of personal data in society, upon which the health of the planet depends, increases during the Novel Coronavirus pandemic, as oil prices fall precipitously, [19] underlining arbitrary state power.

9. The Novel Coronavirus pandemic speaks to a reframe of international relations, defined, more broadly, as the study of war and peace, away from a Western core [20] by challenging traditional assumptions in theory with reference empirically to personal data researched from the field in a range of cases across continents.

10. International relations are interdisciplinary, which requires knowledge comparatively of world history, personal data, and public health [21] to advance theory given the impact of infectious diseases over time on diverse species. [22]

11. The COVID-19 pandemic anchors “the Other” [23] as subject of international relations with concerns about race, nationalism, and religion highlighted in the ethics of personal data collection and the domains of identity. [24]

12. As a pandemic without historical precedent in its economic, demographic, and social implications, the Novel Coronavirus places gender concerns, [25] highlighting male-female power dynamics, in tandem with internal conflict and public health at the heart of non-governmental organizations’ international humanitarian engagement.

 

Colette Mazzucelli, MALD, EdM, PhD, is a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader, Chair of the NYU European Horizons Advisory Board, and Senior Vice President (Academia) of the Global Listening Centre. Since 2004, she has been teaching on Graduate Faculty in New York University specializing in conflict resolution, radicalization & religion, international relations in the post-Cold War era, ethnic conflict, and Europe in the 21st Century.

List of References

 

Talk of the Town: 5 Things that Happened in the Publishing Industry in March 2020

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March 2020 has been an incredibly testing month as countries around the world continue to fight the coronavirus pandemic and people settle into their homes to transition to a “new normal.”

That’s why Anthem Press has curated 5 note-worthy articles that contribute to a holistic understanding of the current state and future trajectory of the publishing industry. Whether data, news or commentary, we aim to keep you informed.

1. A surge in manuscript submissions from authors working in self-isolation.

Despite the global shutdowns on nonessential businesses, The Guardian reports that editors of publishing houses are busier than ever. Why? Authors are using stay-at-home orders to generate productivity. But literary experts caution writers from using pandemics/contagion as subject matter for their stories.

Full story here

2. A rapid increase in physical book sales, but it might not be sustainable.

According to BBC News, in the UK, people are stockpiling novels, particularly fiction, children’s books, puzzle books, handicrafts, and true crime. But as nonessential businesses shut down operations, there’s inevitable harm coming to booksellers who rely on consistent sales.

Full story here

3. Canada loosens copyright restrictions to open “Read Aloud Canadian Books.”

Publishing Perspectives observes that as schools shut down across Canada, educators and librarians have been reinventing ways to make resources available in a home-learning environment. Partnering with Canada’s primary English-language copyright revenue, Access Copyright, educators can record videos of themselves reading aloud classroom material for students.

Full story here

4. The coronavirus pandemic will change the book industry forever.

The Los Angeles Times delivers a daunting commentary on the book industry’s future. Like many nonessential consumer sectors, independent bookstores are taking hard hits, with stores closing their physical locations as well as mass layoffs on the horizon. The only booksellers that may come out of the pandemic unscathed are ones that turn to ebooks and audiobooks, like Amazon.photo-1561851561-04ee3d324423

Full story here

5. #Bookstagram: a global movement of social media-savvy book reviewers are influencing publishing houses from the bottom-up.

Bookstagrams are book blogs in Instagram form, where readers curate and review booklists for an online community with a shared love of reading. But The Independent also observes that bookstagrams are influencing book marketing experts, as companies look toward trendy social media accounts to design commercial book covers.

Full story here

The Fanfare of Progress: Foreign Occupation and the Viability of the 2030 Agenda

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Five years ago, the UN passed the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This resulted in the establishment of seventeen different goals, more commonly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), accompanied by 169 targets and indicators to achieve this agenda by 2030. Building upon the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and what both supporters and critics might acknowledge was at best, haphazard success, the SDGs are distinct in major ways.

First, the very process of collaboration over the 2030 Agenda was far more inclusive than with the MDGs, with a wide range of NGO and civil society actors participating in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Summit. The SDGs consist of seventeen goals, rather than eight. The goals and objectives of the SDGs are also unprecedented both in scope and ambition. Inequality is presented as a global issue, not tied to country indicators, but rampant within, between, and across national boundaries. The environmental sustainability of our planet cuts across numerous goals, framing our economic and political systems as interdependent and requiring greater cooperation and collaboration. The SDGs apply to all countries, unlike the MDGs, which were directed towards “developing” countries only. Major issues such as hunger, poverty, armed conflict, etc. are to be eliminated, reaching their statistical zero, rather than halved or portrayed as social ills countries must work toward reducing by some generous proportion.

These are not insignificant differences. The 2030 Agenda and SDGs demonstrate an increasingly globalized development community — one that acknowledges the need for greater collaboration and cooperation, and actually directly acknowledges the connections between a range of issues, their symptoms, and the political and economic systems that govern human societies. In turn, the SDGs actually explicitly address issues of conflict, justice, and political institutions. Goal sixteen is perhaps both the most overtly and vaguely political in this regard. The targets for this goal include reducing violence “everywhere” (16.1), promoting rule of law and ensuring equal access to justice (16.3), developing effective, accountable and transparent institutions (16.6), and strengthening national institutions to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime (16.A). In short, this goal is reaching for world peace, or at the bare minimum, some formal establishment of a globalized system of justice and accountability.

But what does this really mean in practice? The UN, affiliated institutions, and the Member States fail to deliver here. It is already a monumental task to maintain the integrity of such institutions on national scales, but should this objective not also acknowledge the need for fostering such accountability not only within, but between states and coalitions of states? The same year UN Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda, many of these same states — also members of NATO — participated in the launch of the US-led Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS). OFS is a scaled back continuation of the thirteen year Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), marking a major shift in how the US and NATO allies framed their occupation of Afghanistan. Instead of embarking on the major military operations that defined OEF, the international coalition would transition to a primarily training and assistance role. Their ambition is great — to develop self-sufficient Afghan forces capable of maintaining security without an international presence. This objective in many ways reflected a quiet acknowledgement among US government, military, and aid workers, actively concealed from the public throughout the occupation of Afghanistan: that the war failed and required an exit strategy.

Development and aid were used as strategies to expedite military outcomes in Afghanistan. Particularly between 2009 and 2012, aid was flooded into the country to build schools, bridges, canals, and other civil-works projects as a tactic to centralize institutions and improve security, acknowledged by aid workers as a “colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive (Whitlock 2019).” It begs the question why the magnitude of international failure in Afghanistan was not a more explicit factor in the establishment of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs, particularly with regards to issues of peace and poverty. How can these goals be achieved when addressing the economic and political relationships that facilitate the symptoms of global systemic inequality and injustice are not explicit objectives?

As the US and NATO allies tire of a two-decade war, negotiation with the Taliban has been widely accepted as the only path towards withdrawal and potential peace. That said, talks have been on and off. The Taliban’s stance on human rights, in particular the rights of women and freedom of expression, among issues pertaining to disarmament, complicate the absolute viability of the SDGs. The 2030 Agenda promised to, “provide a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future (SDGs 2020).” In considering the SDGs and the future of global agendas, we cannot ignore the contradictions that exist between agendas and relationships. As the signatories of this agenda continue to occupy a military presence in Afghanistan, it is fair to ask, how does the broader development community reconcile the heritage of waves of international invasion instigated by their own states within societies which resist and distrust national systems? It is a complex question, one that remains unresolved and resides deeply within the vision of the 2030 Agenda. Acknowledging the mistakes of the donor community, particularly with regard to violent conflict, displacement and poverty, must be an integral part of any meaningful global effort toward sustainable development. If the failures of the international community in Afghanistan continue to be neglected amid the fanfare of cooperation surrounding the 2030 Agenda, efforts to sustainably develop our world will only perpetuate the very systems of inequality and injustice they seek to move beyond.

 

Avideh Mayville, Ph.D, is a program manager, researcher, and leader with over a decade of experience across non-profits, think tanks, and higher education institutions. Her areas of specialty include globalization and development policy, development in conflict environments, the security-development nexus, and human rights-based approaches to development. She writes about these issues in her personal blog: Aid, Olive Branches, and Machine Guns. 

The Transformation of Capacity in International Development (Anthem Press, November 2019) is her first book. 9781785271557-2813_x_4500px_1

The Art of Startups: do you really need an MBA to launch your company?

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Should startup founders get an MBA?

If you are planning to work in consulting, or dream of a corporate job, there are many advantages to studying for an MBA. For one thing, it will definitely help you to get your foot in the door.

It is also true many co-founders meet each other during their MBA. The opportunity to network is an important draw for those considering MBA programs. However, it is less clear that an MBA will equip founders with the basic tools and skill sets they need to thrive as entrepreneurs, in the challenging world of startups.

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My Story

When I started my MBA, I’d already launched my first two startup companies. Studying and working on projects in teams was interesting, but I felt straight away that most of the strategies I was being taught were mainly geared towards working for large, already well-established organizations, such as multinational companies or corporations. As such, they didn’t really apply to startup founders of (at least initially) new or small businesses.

I remember spending long hours studying competitors rather than studying potential users.  Likewise, the focus of our projects was analyzing, planning, and forecasting, rather than executing, launching, and learning. In the classroom we would look at case studies and debate mergers and acquisitions, international expansions, and vertical integrations… These are all important strategies for market leaders, but in the context it is very unrealistic, if not useless, to speak of such strategies.

Launching and running a small startup requires a different approach, and a different skill set.

Small Startups: the Brutal Statistics

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 89.6 percent of companies are not large corporations, but small businesses (classified as employing fewer than 20 people): that is, most companies in the US are, or once have been, small startup companies. What’s more, they account for more than half of the country’s total workforce.

But crucially, while over 627,000 new companies – startups – open their doors each year, more than 50 percent do not reach past the five-year mark. Yes: more than one out of two of all startup companies will fail within five years.

Looking at that steep failure rate indicates that as far as new ventures are concerned, there is a clear gap in educating founders on specific strategies designed for startup companies.

Obviously, starting a new venture will always entail a high systematic risk. However, trying to apply strategies designed for large or established companies to startups is a sure recipe for a loss of focus, if not a death sentence in business terms.

I believe the startups default ratio could decrease if founders could have a specific road map of strategies that takes into account the size, stage and market of their company..

The Art of Startups

When I coach startup companies, the two most common mistakes I see are almost invariably that:

  1. Founders spread their initiatives and resources too wide, and therefore too thinly (e.g. money, time, manpower, geography, products/service, target users). In an ideal world, with no competition, it would of course make sense for startups to keep their spectrum broad, and to try to serve as large a market as possible. But in the real world concentrating all your resources on one spot is the only way to beat the odds for startups.

  2. Founders corner themselves to the role of followers by copying the strategies of already successful companies. Instead, they should innovate: this allows startups to avoid direct competition from the incumbent companies. Also, it’s the only way for startups to find untapped user niches. It’s virtually impossible for startups to offer something better to their users if they keep shadowing leaders.

But these points are just the beginning.

In my new book, The Art of Startups (April 2020, Anthem Press), I have drawn on my experience as a serial entrepreneur and startup coach to create a startup-focused guide for unlocking innovation and building new businesses against the odds.

No, it’s not another fast track MBA; we already have plenty of those online courses. Rather, I aim to address the real problem: the failure rate of startup companies, arising from applying the wrong strategy and innovating ineffectively.

Through an innovative graphic novel format including real case studies and groundbreaking evidence, The Art of Startups, which has already garnered attention from the Financial Times and McKinsey & Co., will guide entrepreneurs how to eschew the common pitfalls and challenges associated with the early days of running a startup.

The engaging visuals are designed to be memorable and accessible, recreating in the graphic-novel form common situations almost every startup faces in an immersive way.

If you want to turn around the fate of your startup, it’s time to focus, and to learn The Art of Startups.

 

Edoardo Maggini is a serial entrepreneur and inventor who has co-founded three successful startup companies within the last decade alone, including Fenix Technologies, where he currently works. He holds an MBA from Pace University as well as an executive degree in business strategy from Harvard Business School.

The Art of Startups is his first book. It has already been nominated for the Financial Times / McKinsey & Co Bracken Bower Award – Best Business Book of the Year. Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder of AirBnB, has written the Foreword.

The Fuzzy Edges of Contemporary Theater

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Theater has always been mercurial if not chimeric, a hybrid of art forms. It is unstable and pliable by definition, since its realization relies on a multiplicity of collaborators under unstable, often tenuous conditions. The result is invariably a composite beast, reconfigured in each iteration.  Unsurprisingly, then, theater today has fuzzy edges – indeed, if it has edges at all, for edges suggest territory, a demesne, a pale, that is, limits, and the art of contemporary performance cuts across, runs through, is entangled with, bleeds into not only many another contemporary art form but intersects with and overlaps popular entertainments and everyday activities, religious and secular, so that the limits, distinctions, boundaries, even generic separations are often indistinguishable among performative activities. Much of such contemporary theater practice develops in defiance of realistic or illusionary threads of performative art with their emphases on architectural and material validity and focus on family constellations.

In his seminal textbook, Performance Studies:An Introduction, Richard Schechner details what he calls “Performing in Everyday Life” with a string of examples of contemporary performative activities: “Family and Social Roles—Job Roles–Spectator Sports and Other Popular Entertainments—Performing Arts—Secular and Sacred Rituals—Trance” (Schechner 172-3).  Such a list is, of course, partial, but its implications are that we are all and always performers, in one way or another, “Performing on stage, performing in special social situations (public ceremonies, for example), and performing in everyday life are a continuum.  These various kinds of performing occur in widely divergent circumstances, from solo shows before the mirror to large-scale public events and rituals, from shaman healing rituals to identity changing trances, from theater and dance to great and small roles of everyday life” (Schnechner, 170).

Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder

The phenomenon of everyday performance is punctuated by the growing trend of being constantly on view, on camera, under perpetual surveillance in much of contemporary urban life. We are thus part of the surveillance society, a society of control, an automatic society with real-time web cams. Some theater groups, like New York’s Surveillance Camera Players, perform against such intrusions into our private spheres, while the rest of us just mug or make obscene gestures to elevator surveillance cameras and the like in our feeble attempts at resistance and defiance, but even such gestures have a tradition.  Early in the Modernist era, Dadaists and Surrealists hated the conventions of theater but loved spectacle and public performance, and so provocations left theatrical space and took the shape of street actions, or “Happenings” in the next generation, a term coined by Allan Kaprow, a student of John Cage at Black Mountain College, in the early 1950s to describe spontaneous, non-linear provocations deemed art.

For Peter Brook, “Happenings” were a part of “The Holy Theatre”:

“A Happening is a powerful invention.  It destroys at one blow many deadly forms, like the dreariness of theatre buildings, and the charmless trappings of curtain, usherette, cloakroom, programme, bar. A Happening can be anywhere, any time, of any duration:  nothing is required, nothing is taboo.  A Happening may be spontaneous, it may be formal, it may be anarchistic, it can generate intoxicating energy.  Behind the Happening is the shout, “Wake up!”

(Brook, 1968, p. 50)

Amid his calls for “a primitive spontaneity,” Eugenio Barba has suggested that “Theatres are still antiquated buildings where classical and contemporary texts are recited in a routine and conventional style.  There is no creative act on stage—only the sterile repetition of worn out formulas and hybrid styles which try to look “Modern” by exploiting the discoveries of other art forms” (Barba 153).  “Happenings” were attempts to break through such conventionality, and in 1963 British publisher John Calder followed up his provocative 1962 Edinburgh Writers’ Festival with what was deemed the notorious 1963 Drama Conference to end that year’s Edinburgh Festival with a series of “Happenings”. As he recalls in his memoirs, Pursuit, the last day of the Festival was dedicated to the topic of what forms the theater might take in the future, during which a young model named Anna Kesselaar would appear in Ken Dewey’s “Happening”:

“….at the end of the organ gallery that ran behind the platform where the conferences sat. She was hanging on to a BBC lighting trolley and was wheeled around the gallery by a BBC technician, naked, but within the law, as she was not moving, but being moved.”

(Calder, p. 260)

Kaprow would follow Dewey’s “Happening” with one of his own – one which impeded the audience members’ exit from the building by having used tires piled in the doorways over which those exiting had to climb.  These events would, in turn, lead to Calder’s famous performances called “Ledlanet Nights” in Kinrosshire, Scotland. These were music, opera and theatrical events at his Baronial ancestral home.  Calder would subsequently use an image from the London Sunday Mirror’s coverage of the uncovered Kesselaar performance on the cover of his autobiography.

 
S.E. Gontarski is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, where he specializes in twentieth-century Irish Studies, performance theory, and British and European modernism. He is also a writer and director, and General Editor of the Anthem Studies in Drama and Performance series.

 

A Fibrous Weave of Literary Scholarship

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This is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Robinson. wordsworthAuthor of Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825–1833: Fibres of These Thoughts, out on Anthem Press this month. 

In the 1980s I first gained sympathy for the poetry of the “late” Wordsworth while helping to edit the “Last Poems” volume of the Cornell variorum. In between long spring and autumn walks, winter evenings trying to keep warm huddled by a small fire and comforted by wee drams of whisky and shortbread, I spent day after day in the Wordsworth Library (Grasmere) poring over manuscript pages. These pages brought me closer to poetry then more or less unread. Critics in those years valued what Wordsworth wrote before 1807 much higher than what he wrote after, all the way to his death in 1850. This iron-clad view was indeed firmly set during his lifetime and still exists today (although scholars over the past 30 years have begun to revise it). Wordsworth himself said of his work in the 1820s, “my vein I fear has run out.”

Valued as one of the premier poets in the history of English-language poetry, Wordsworth called the poems in Lyrical Ballads (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805) an “experiment” in the language and content of verse designed to acknowledge the social and spiritual lives of the lower and lower-middle classes. The older successful poet of the late 1820s and early 1830s was—according to many readers from his own time to the present—no experimentalist. Only when absorbed in the manuscripts of the “late” Wordsworth’s poetry at the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere, did I intuit that the view of his work which reviewers and critics have characterized as politically conservative and religiously orthodox, and formally complacent, might not be completely true. Surely the poet of Lyrical Ballads capable of articulating and practicing a paradigm shift in what we can expect of poetry would not altogether lose that early intellectual energy, vision, poetic skill, and most of all a sense of exploration, over time.

Reading these manuscripts again and again particularly in the past seven years, turning the pages in his notebooks over and over, picking up a characteristic atmosphere of varying pen pressures, a range of penmanships, strike-overs, obsessions with certain words, phrases, and rhythms drew me into an intimacy with a writing and thinking process revelatory (or so I have imagined) of Wordsworth’s direction of thought and practice. I saw vitality there indicative of the experimental spirit applied to the making of his best poems. This book is a history of this experimental spirit working at full throttle even during a time which his best biographer (Stephen Gill) called “fallow.”

We do not typically associate the act and presentation of scholarly criticism with intimacy, yet that is what I have cultivated and sought to broadcast in this book. I have learned from the French theory of manuscript study called Critique genetique, in which a poet’s manuscripts afford not only the data of the “early draft” as information containing the “final,” publishable draft in embryo, but also the avant-texte, manuscript as an event in itself, with its data a swirl of composition and processual thinking. To make contact with the page as motion, or motions, requires—at least for me—an intimacy with its goings on. The motions are discrete, hidden, yet they register, as Wordsworth said, “the life of things” and “the dimpling stir of life”—a life of poetic consciousness, a different kind of data for the critic.

In that relationship between reader and text, I have noted that, while the physical page puts a fence around its contents, provides a limit, the page also projects itself outward to other domains of living that I have chosen to follow scrupulously: landscapes walked by Wordsworth, rooms in which he lived and wrote, family who copied out his drafts and participated in his thinking and writing, histories of poetic movements. The expansion of focus further includes my own walking and observing and my own original poems “found” in Wordsworth’s manuscripts and poems, and then, finally and crucially, other poems that he drafted during the same years.

In other words, as I worked on these materials, I found myself increasingly committed to an ever-expanding space that became a phenomenon of poetic activity. I have tried to represent this phenomenon on the pages of my book, with multiple coordinates for reading and viewing: notes not at the bottom of the page but along the side, colour images both of manuscript highlights and points in the landscape, paratexts from other writers, and colour displays of my own poems. All of this I interweave with a steady expository text stream. The subtitle of the book, “Fibres of These Thoughts” taken from a late-Wordsworth poem, vividly imagines thought and poetry and writing (in a manuscript) as texture of brain, muscle, and paper, no part extractable from the whole. I recast the phrase as characteristic of my book; what I hope will be a web-like recovery of a crucial period not usually acknowledged in the career of this great poet and his work.